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Wednesday, April 30, 2014

LinkedIn is supposed to be a professional network. Right? Though it is a personal freedom of the users to use the social networks as they please, LinkedIn was able to secure some niche uses. At least till recently. Recently I noticed my news feed filled up with completely irrelevant, Facebook-like updates. Sadly, these updates are still boring, unlike Facebook. Here are a few examples (names are changed), that are something completely irrelevant for a "Professional network".

1. Annoying "80% will fail" claims to childish tasks.

2. Information on who "likes" whose profile photos.

Come on, I have Facebook for that, and I spend enough time doing and reading the same shit there! It is hiding more relevant information such as the news updates and opportunities from my friends and colleagues, which I use LinkedIn for. This is something to blame on LinkedIn, and not the users.

3. Some vague shit written by some weird "influencer"

I
accept that I have read so many interesting news articles from
LinkedIn. But the articles from influencers are often spam-material. To
mention one, an "influencer" discusses how she merrily fires 25% of her
task force annually, as they are the bottom 25% in performance. She
calls to fire the losers sooner - shoot the dogs early. Genius! I can
tolerate her post, if she was my friend. But this is seriously some
bull. Anyway, I don't pay for LinkedIn. Let me tolerate the trash for
the good in it.I am just clueless how these people end up in my news feed as influencers. Probably they are paying for it.

Probably LinkedIn wants to expand its user base beyond boring stuff, and make it as 'kewl' as Facebook. Everyone wants to be another Facebook, it seems. If that was not the case, they should at least consider letting me hide information such as "comment" or "like" activities, without unsubscribing from a person completely. These are anyway my personal opinions. Feel free to disagree.

Tuesday, April 22, 2014

Short description: Consumers
download the data by searching the image repository using the browser.
The information that the consumer is interested in, gets updated
whenever the data producers update or add patient information. The
current download tool lacks the ability to track the relevant updates to
the consumer. A pub-sub solution based on Apache CXF, utilizing the
JAX-RS REST API of CXF will assist automated downloads to the consumers.

I am happy to be back wearing the student hat in the GSoC after a long time, with the transition of Student (AbiWord) -> Student (OMII-UK) -> Mentor (AbiWord) -> Mentor (AbiWord) -> Mentor (AbiWord) -> Student(BMI-CCI). Interestingly, this is the 10th GSoC, and the 6th Google Summer of Code that I am involved in. This is also my 3rd time as a student, and the first time ending up in the de-duplication, with Freenet and Emory BMI, where both of them are two awesome project communities. My thanks goes to the mentors and developers from both organizations. Hope I will be able to work with Freenet in the upcoming years, as I could work with only one organization in a summer. I have already started playing with Freenet, as a side effect of the GSoC. :-)

I will probably keep this blog updated with information related to the GSoC 2014. My sincere thanks goes to my supervisor Prof. Luis Veiga for his continuous motivation, and also for encouraging me in GSoC. My thanks also goes to OGSA-DAI mentors and developers from the EPCC at the Edinburgh University, which was the first university affiliated lab that I worked with, for a GSoC. I loved that experience. I loved being with AbiWord as a student and as a mentor. This year, AbiWord chose not to participate in the GSoC, after its successful participation since 2006 to 2013.

Friday, April 18, 2014

So I decided to upgrade my Ubuntu installation to 14.04 LTS from 13.10. During the update, the installation complained that the grub had been replaced by either me or some script, and prompted whether to keep my changed version or accept the unedited version of Ubuntu 14.04. I remember, this is because of the Boot Repair Tool, which made Windows 8.1 and Ubuntu 13.10 to live together in my system, by fixing the boot loader with its grub entries. I decided to keep my version, as I felt otherwise I would lose the option to boot into Windows 8.1, as the default may not include Windows in its grub. Moreover, I just decided to go with the default option provided in the prompt (to go with my version). Upon the upgrade, I restarted the computer. Alas! It was showing the missing item and taking me to a grub> shell.

I decided to use Boot Repair Tool once more. It started smoothly, and fixed my system for the second time. Now, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS is my primary operating system, dual booting with Windows 8.1. You may view my logs below. ;) For further information and assistance, contact the developers at boot.repair@gmail.com. You may be interested in reading the previous episode as well. ;)

Those who were here..

Pradeeban Kathiravelu is a distributed systems researcher. He holds a Ph.D. double degree, Erasmus Mundus Joint Doctorate in Distributed Computing (EMJD-DC), from INESC-ID Lisboa / Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal and Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium. He also holds a Master of Science degree, Erasmus Mundus European Master in Distributed Computing (EMDC), from Instituto Superior Técnico, Portugal, and KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden, and a BSc (Eng) Computer Science & Engineering from University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka.
His research interests include Distributed Systems, Network Softwarization, Software-Defined Systems, Cloud-Assisted Networks, Big data Integration, Internet Measurements, and Service-Oriented Architecture. He is highly interested in free and open source software development, and is an active participant of the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) program since 2009, as a student and as a mentor.